When I was a young entrepreneur, I always tried to be professional. It was the professional, after all, who would win the contracts, make the money and benefit from the relationships that mattered. All I needed to do was keep my head down and turn up on time.

I worked hard at my career, and only one thing became apparent. It was this:
The harder you work, the harder you are expected to work.

It was 2004. I was lodging myself deeply into the world of programming at an incredibly boring company that promised to pay me very well in exchange for spending the rest of my life staring at beige walls and listening to people yammering on about targets, performance quotas, and all manner of buzz words that meant absolutely nothing in the real world. I'd found myself surrounded by claims adjusters who fantasized about being a senior claims adjusters. People whose lives started at 5pm on a Friday and ended at 9pm on a Sunday. People who enjoyed ultra-careful office humor and overpriced sandwiches that tasted like the plastic boxes they came in.

By this point, I'd already spent a couple of years in factories and cubicles, and beneath cars and petty managers, and I had discovered the stalemate truth; I would never be happy until I was free, and I'd never be free until I was happy.

With this discovery under my belt, the term work/life balance suddenly made sense. You have to choose which one you want to nurture and let the other one go. With that, I packed my bags and said goodbye to the circus. And for the last twenty years, I've lived life as a serial office dodger, dipping into work as and when necessary, and then bouncing right out again, once the sun comes out. It's a life of relative freedom (more on that here), and it serves me well.

So, that, dear reader, is what it's all about.

- Burtman, office dodger, freelance jack of all trades, professional amateur and eternal student of all things interesting.